About Review:

Review:

We recently upgraded our On Premise Team Foundation Server (TFS) from 2012 to 2015 and prior to doing so I attempted to find any books on TFS 2015 but was unable to find any. I was able to finally find a few books on the topic of TFS 2015 after we had finished our upgrade so this is the first of four books.

The book, 'Essentials of Administering Team Foundation Server 2015' by Gary Gauvin, starts off like many books and that is by covering the requirements of any software. The bonus I would say this book offers, where others may lack, is the fact that Gary is a TFS Expert so beyond the Microsoft provided requirements for TFS, he provides real world experience suggestions and recommendations. The next few chapters are all about installation and verification of a successful installation. Similar to the first chapter, Gary is able to provide his professional experience and insight on top of the prescribed Microsoft way of doing things. The remaining chapters are, as I stated early, all about how to use the basics of TFS 2015.

For someone who has been using TFS On Premise for many years and Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) for the last couple of years, I find this book to be more of a review than educational. I will say I did come across several pieces of information that I did not know but these were more Gary's insight on how TFS should be configured.

If you and/or your company are new to TFS On Premise I would highly recommend reading this book prior to implementing TFS. This book is short and a quick read and I would say you could read the book while setting up your TFS Test Environment. This way, you can follow all his 'walk-through' and then have a stable test environment to play with before implementing TFS to be used with your development team.